House of Lords: Lord Speaker’s Committee Report

Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)]

My Lords, I should say at the outset that this report, I am afraid, makes me feel somewhat uneasy. However, I acknowledge that the noble Lord, Lord Burns, and the members of his committee have produced ingenious, persuasive and seductive proposals. They have done exactly what they set out to do and have done it skilfully. They have come forward with a system that reduces the size of this House without the need for legislation. I well understand why the committee wanted a system that did not involve legislation, but that is precisely what causes me unease. Without legislation, the committee is proposing that we in this House, not one of whom has been elected by the general public, should decide for ourselves how many Members we should have. We the unelected will decide that; not the electorate, the elected House of Commons or the elected Government, but ourselves—an unelected elite.

The report goes on to propose a formula for deciding how many Members of this House should be Conservative, Labour, Lib Dem or independent. It may well be sensible but, in deciding that formula, it would be the unelected deciding the party make-up of this House—not the electorate, the House of Commons or the elected Government. This matters because we are a legislature. This House helps to write the law of the land and, despite the Parliament Acts, every year this House writes or rewrites much of the legislation that reaches the statute book. Yet, under these proposals, this House would decide off its own bat its size and party make-up. If this kind of self-appointed oligarchy were being established in a parliament in some far-off banana republic, I bet that there would be howls of outrage from many parts of this House about the affront to democracy.

I understand that the report’s objective is to improve the public’s perception of the House of Lords, but I have an inkling that the public may not be as easily appeased as we might think.